Mindfulness – our sixth sense: responding to stress

Posted on February 23, 2014 by amindfullife

This week, week five, in our ten week mindfulness series by Dr Patricia (Trish) Lück, a palliative care physician and facilitator of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programmes, we explore the theme of Responding to stress.

At its essence the MBSR was developed as a stress reduction programme. The first classes started in 1979 at what was then called: The Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. This programme was engaging with cultivating a way of learning to respond to the many stressors in our lives including: pain, suffering, chronic illness and many varied difficult life conditions, rather than indulging the reactivity of the mind that is the result of habitual ways of being.  

How we respond to stress, however, is infinitely individual and infinitely dependent on our perceptions of what for us is stressful. None of us have the two same definitions. We may have some tacit agreement that a certain level of distress and suffering is stressful – pain, illness, emotional and spiritual distress, dying, and death, but we cannot be specific on how the individual themselves responds to that stress. This is highly personal and unique. What I may find stressful, another person may not be perturbed by. So what is it that makes the difference? I could go into more depth and detail, but enough perhaps to say that how we respond to stress depends on our own history, experiences, genetic make up, cultural and social environment, our experiences of change, trauma, ability to cope with difficulty, as well as habitual reactivity. 

Herein resides the crux of stress reactivity, our habitual reactivity, our habitual way of defaulting to automatic pilot without engaging choice in the moment. Once we become aware of what it is that causes our body and mind to react to stress with a cascade of hormones that cause changes in breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, gut activity, mental function and more, we have cultivated some capacity for choice. This is the capacity which is developed through mindfulness: The capacity to be aware of what causes us stress, to examine it with curiosity with no attachment to changing the outcome, with kindness and compassion toward our own very human experience. The capacity to trust that in this moment we are okay, no matter what is happening. 

In the past week, if you have been following this series and doing the short meditations and practices, you will have been paying attention to pleasant events. You will have been noticing if you can catch the moment of the experience. Being aware of the event as it unfolded, the sights, the sounds, the sensations, the smells, the emotions, the thoughts, the interaction of what happened, and through this noticing being fully present and engaged with awareness of ‘pleasant’. Even if it may have been a fleeting moment of smelling a rose on Valentine’s Day, eating a piece of chocolate, or drinking a cup of tea, allowing your noticing and senses to be fully engaged in experiencing the pleasant moment. We so often allow the small moments to rush past and give the unpleasant moments more prominence. So in the exercises, we have been reflecting for a moment here on one of these pleasant moments and all that was evoked at that time. 

The task that will be set for this week is noticing the unpleasant moments: allowing them to unfold with kindness and curiosity to the experience that is labeled in your mind as being unpleasant. Seeing if you can be curious as to what this is, what makes it unpleasant, how does the body feel, what are the sensations, where, what are the accompanying thoughts and emotions? Noticing perhaps changes in breath, temperature, heartbeat, skin sensation, and the racing, seemingly knowing mind of how this particular unpleasant event reinforces a habitual pattern of mind. Or does it? Perhaps take some time to bring kind curiosity and attention to what is already here without making up a story about how it is.

One little girl who showed me the meaning of responding rather than reacting to the certainty of death was a little girl with leukaemia from one of our northern neighbors in South Africa. Going back home to the certainty of very few days she chose to engage with the remaining days she had with laughter and joy, with reconnecting to her faith in the afterlife and the love of her god with dreams and stories, and being nurtured by the care of her loving family. Even though in the end the safety net of medication and medical support we had tried to set up did not work as well as we had hoped, she did not dissolve into despair or fear but continued to chose to be present to life with the joyful heart she had brought to all of her 14 years, showing me how it was possible to not be caught in reactivity of fear and difficulty and distress, even in the face of certain death. 

So this week be curious about what you may be labeling as an unpleasant event, how this may be stressful for you, what your experience is in this moment– body sensations, thoughts, emotions– noting one event per day down in your journal if you wish. 

Continue to work with previous short practices: being with breathing, eating, attending to a daily routine task, and engaging with the body scan with curiosity and kindness and patience and add in this week a short walk meditation practice.

Walking Meditation: 

Spend a few moments attending just to walking. This can be outside or inside. Where ever you feel comfortable.Chose a short particular lane (of your own making) in which to walk. Let your arms be soft, either by your side or held gently in front or behind your body. Allow your eyes to have a gentle focus a short distance in front of your body. Noticing as you walk the sensation of walking in your body, your legs, your feet. Notice the contact and connection made with the surface you are walking on, either barefoot, stocking-footed or with shoes. Notice the action of walking as you are walking – lifting – shifting – placing – lifting – shifting – placing…Noticing breathing, thoughts, other sensations, emotions arising in the moment. If it is helpful, naming these in your head, and letting go of needing to make a story of any of them, returning your attention gently each time to simply noticing walking.

Posted in ehospice: Mindfulness - our sixth sense | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

2014 The Engaging with a Wholeheart Project: February

Posted on February 14, 2014 by amindfullife
Love After Love
The time will come
When, with elation
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome
And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine, give bread, give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you have ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
By Derek Walcott

 IMG_4174

Today February 14th is widely celebrated as Valentine’s Day.  A day of the heart.  A day for relationships.  A day for declaring love, commercially feted as the day to buy flowers, cards, chocolates, dinner, and more.  But for me the most important relationship we can cultivate is perhaps that to the self.  The self we often forget, ignore, pretend was not quite the way it is, and show up as another.  Derek Walcott has it completely accurate when he speaks about loving the stranger we have ignored for another.  This stranger we have tried to mold into another, that we have not loved, and whom we have abandoned.  So today on this day of love, remember this stranger.  And peel that image off the mirror and feast on the one that has always been there.  That patiently resides at the very heart of our being.

This month’s Wholeheart Project theme is cultivating authenticity, letting go of what will people think. “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.  Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy – the experiences that makes us the most vulnerable.  Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” Brené Brown.

These past few days I have spent time with one of my children struggling with exactly this.  How to move forward with courage and conviction for this one life of ours and make choices that support our own needs, regardless of the fall out that it may have.  To allow our own authenticity to show, and be vulnerable in the face of what people think, is indeed perhaps the most courageous act we can make.

So for now I have little more to share.  Perhaps just some curiosity about how you see yourself showing up in your own lives?  What do you see when you peel the image away from the mirror and feast in that which you already are? May you have courage and conviction this month to live your own life, to peel the image off the mirror and get to know the stranger you may have ignored.  Have courage to be vulnerable in the face of living your own authentic life.  There is no other.

Posted in 2014 Engaging with Wholeheart Project | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Being Present

Posted on February 12, 2014 by amindfullife
  • Edition:
  • International
Edition: InternationalEducationMindfulness –…

Mindfulness – our sixth sense: being present

Author: Dr Patricia (Trish) Lück
12 February 2014
Feature | Education

This week, week four, of our ten week mindfulness series by Dr Patricia (Trish) Lück, a palliative care physician and facilitator of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programmes, we explore the theme of Being Present.

“Be courageous enough to remain alongside families ‘into that place of unknowing'”. – Words spoken by Sister Frances Dominica this week during her opening address to the Inaugural International Children’s Palliative Care Network Conference in Mumbai, India, sharing her story of opening the first children’s hospice, Helen House, in Oxford in the UK. I wonder how many of us feel we have this courage in our daily caring for patients with life limiting and threatening illness.

How often each day do we feel able to walk alongside families into the ‘place of unknowing’? Do we know when it arises? Can we recognise when we are being present to that moment that demands we remain alongside families we care for into that place of unknowing, often a place of fear, uncertainty, pain, suffering, and distress. Mindfulness helps us turn toward each moment, no matter the difficulty, and stay present for ourselves and for our patients and their families, and their very particular needs that only arise when we make space for the unknown; the unknowing of this moment as it unfolds.

Courage seems to be the theme today. The theme of what is demanded of us when we dare to be present for whatever arises in our daily lives of being present to ourselves as well as to the families we serve. Not only spoken to by Sister Dominica in her opening address, but also raised in discussion of an upcoming talk I am being asked to give and how being mindful is not about creating a wonderfully rosy life, but is about engaging with the life we already find ourselves living with courage and conviction. Cultivating the capacity to be present with the– at times extremes of– difficulty and not turn away from the suffering and distress that may be present. This takes courage indeed.

If you have been following these weekly articles the past three weeks and practising being with breathing, eating, attending to a daily routine task, and engaging with the body scan with curiosity and kindness and patience, you may have started to notice moments opening up that have felt unburdened by constant thought or difficulty, but just were present– even at times in the midst of difficulty itself. That once we start paying attention to the small unfolding moments and allowing them to be just as they are, there are perhaps many more moments of wonder that we may have otherwise missed.

One evening a couple of years ago I was called out by a young family, new to me, in distress, who having returned home precipitously from a brief holiday as their child’s pain had increased dramatically, could not coax him out of the car once home and back inside the house, who refused to have anyone else come, and so they patiently waited until I arrived to render the hoped-for miracle. Distressing it was for all involved, a fearful pain-ridden child huddled in the back of the car, anxious adults all around, a moment of anxious unknowing for all of us.

Climbing carefully into the back seat of the car, I surrendered to that place of unknowing, gently inquiring, reassuring, problem solving, medicating, waiting for effect, and during that time even sharing some silly laughter at the expense of all of us crowded in and around the back seat of the car.

We were preparing for the moment of choice, the moment of action, of difficulty we all knew would come. And in the moments of staying with the unknowing, with the difficulty, we too could be open to the brief moments of joy, moments that might have been easily missed, the glimpses of laughter that made the unbearable moments to come bearable, able to be held and turned toward, and then let go of once it had passed. Moments of courage to remain alongside the unknowing and be present for what was needed.

During the second and third week of a traditional MBSR programme, we pay attention to the aspects of our own body and mind that constantly comment on our present moment experience– commentary and critique that often keeps us lodged firmly into either the past or the future with little space for being present to the only moment that we have to make any choice. This is the only moment we have for affecting any change in our lives. The capacity of mindful presence enables our capacity to be present, to respond with awareness rather than the reactivity of habit, and in that moment gives us the gift of choice to decide. Mindful presence is about knowing this moment, however it shows up, whether pleasant or unpleasant, and in the noticing, we may become aware that even in the most difficult moments there can be moments of joy.

Often we only notice our moments in hindsight. Remembering them to be either pleasant or unpleasant. Realising perhaps too late how wonderful the moment was, rarely having a present moment awareness of what a pleasant experience feels like in the moment that it is happening. So for this week, pay attention to noticing pleasant moments. Noticing the moment at the very moment of the experience. Being curious if you can catch the moment of having a pleasant experience as it arises, just as it is. Noticing the body sensations, the emotions that arise, thoughts that accompany the moment. Seeing if you can catch this moment as it arises and unfolds, and then noting it and describing it. Keeping a daily record if you wish, one pleasant moment noticed each day.

Continue also to spend moments noticing and following your breath, eating and drinking with awareness, practicing a ten-minute bodyscan, and doing one daily habitual task mindfully. Cultivating patience, kindness, curiosity, and a capacity to be with and turn toward this moment, however you may find it to be.

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves
Like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue
Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given
For you would not be able to live them
And the point is to live everything
Live the questions now
And perhaps without knowing it
You will live along some day into the answers
By Rainer Maria Rilke

IMG_0950

Posted in ehospice: Mindfulness - our sixth sense | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Perception and practice

Posted on February 5, 2014 by amindfullife

Today I thought I would simply share as my post the article that I wrote for ehospice.com this week.  It tells a story that continues to resonate even after twelve years.  A story of presence, of kindness, of attending with gentleness.  I hope it resonates with some of you and you find the simple exercises of value. 

Mindfulness – our sixth sense: perception and appraisal

Today is the third week of our ten week mindfulness series by Dr Patricia (Trish) Lück, a palliative care physician and facilitator of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programmes, exploring perception and appraisal in everyday palliative care moments.

One of my very first hospice patients that I was called to visit at home many years ago was a challenging engagement with age, gender, culture, religion, and more. He was a young Muslim man, bedbound now due to a spinal tumour, being tenderly cared for by his mother.

We had many communication bridges to cross before I could be of any real assistance to him, many moments of just sitting quietly together, through the at times awkward silences, as I waited for what was needed beyond the obvious of pain control, advice for his mother, and time spent drawing pictures with his little sister.

Eventually after many visits of patient silence and growing trust, he asked the question that had hung in the air for so long. “Please, tell me again, about my tumour, and what it means.”

And so the conversation started. The inquiry into what he knew, how much he wanted to know, the full discussion and eventually release into the truth that he would die with this. What remains with me is not so much the discussion and his subsequent death, but his response to very first question I asked him that day. A response that to this day informs every encounter I have with a patient and their family. I asked him: “How do you want me to tell you?” And his only response was: “Gently,” having previously been at the receiving end of a very callous and harsh disclosure process. My perception of this young man, and for that matter, any young man, did a complete rotational shift and with it my approach to all subsequent difficult conversations.

Perhaps it was an obvious one; there is no other way to have such a difficult conversation, other than gently, but having a paralyzed, bedbound, dying young man name it so openly for me, shifted my world. It could only do so because I had been paying attention and been open to what he needed. I had not prejudged what it was that he needed me to say.

We all probably have had the experience of watching clouds drift across the sky changing their form and imagining various images and shapes in them. Everyone has a different idea of what the cloud looks like, and this is a little bit like our own life experience. We all have a different opinion of what difficult is, what stressful is, what it is that we struggle with, and as such really can not know the experience of the other, other than offering our presence, our kindness and our willingness to walk the road beside them. This applies both for those we care for and for ourselves. Stress, as we understand it, is not what happens to us, but what happens anyway and how we respond to it.

Our capacity to stay present for and have a greater understanding and awareness of our own experience enables us to have greater capacity to stay present for others and allow their experience to be held in a way that can assist them on their difficult journey.

You may have noticed last week with the short meditations as you paid attention to breathing or to eating and drinking, that your mind tended to wander off on its own to other thoughts, memories of past events, planning the future, perhaps discomforts of the mind and body, and before you knew it the breathing, the eating, the drinking was forgotten until your remembered anew: ‘Oh..! breathing, eating, drinking…’ and you guided your attention back to what you were engaged in. For now that is the practice, noticing as your attention wanders and as soon as you notice, your attention is present again in this moment. It is present to choosing to attend back to the breathing, the eating, the drinking. This practice grows our capacity for patience and asks that we look at each new moment with curiosity and wonder, letting go of any preconceived idea of what this moment should look like, allowing it to show up just as it is, not needing to embellish any of it, not needing it to be anything in particular other than being intensely curious about how it actually is. You bring a sense of kindly curiosity to that enquiry. You might be surprised to find that this moment that perhaps seemed to take a prejudged quality, when engaged with mindfully, holds a multitude of moments that cover the full spectrum from pleasant to unpleasant, and even neutral. 

So as you move through this next week, notice your moments of deciding an outcome before it has already happened, cultivate patience, curiosity, and kindness to whatever this moment may be unfolding for you. Continue to take a few moments to notice and follow your breathing through the day, noticing as your mind wanders to thoughts, other body sensations, emotions, returning as soon as you notice, to being aware of the moment of breathing, exhaling, inhaling.

Here are two short meditation exercises for you to practice:

Bodyscan

For about 10 minutes a day, over the course of this next week, sit in a quiet space, comfortable in a chair or on the floor. If you wish, you can allow your eyes to close or keep them softly focused ahead of you. Begin with settling into breathing as you have been doing this past week. Noticing breathing in and breathing out, either at the nostrils, chest region, or abdomen. Noticing the movement of air, the rise and fall of the ribcage, diaphragm and abdominal wall. Then slowly allow your attention to shift to the feet, the legs, and notice sensations in this area of the body: front and back surfaces, external and internal sensations, contours, creases, clothing, air, temperature, pressure, discomfort, without needing any of these sensations to change. Gradually shift your attention up through the body: through the lower legs, the knees, the upper limbs to the hips joints and on to the torso. The pelvic area, the back, the abdomen, the chest region, the shoulders and arms from fingertips, lower arms, elbows, upper arms, shoulder joints, gradually moving onto the neck, the face, the head, paying attention to all the small areas of shift and change in sensation. At times you may not have any awareness of sensation or be aware of discomfort, all of this is okay, and as best you can, just notice what is present without needing that to change. Attending to all sensations with gentleness, openness, and kindness, and if needing to move, doing so with engaged choice and awareness. Ending the meditation exercise with becoming aware of the body in its completeness and wholeness, all of the individual areas being part of the whole that make up this body, your body, so much more of it being okay than perhaps you have noticed before.

Routine activities

For this week chose one routine activity you do every day and attend to doing it with intentional kind attention. Noticing the movement, the sensations, the thoughts and emotions that may be present.  Be intimately engaged with what you are attending to and curious about a perhaps habitual activity to which you generally give little thought – showering, brushing teeth, washing dishes, or anything else you may choose for this activity – noticing movement, flow of water, touch of air, what you do that you normally don’t notice so intently.

Posted in ehospice: Mindfulness - our sixth sense | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The many blessings of longing and joy

Posted on January 25, 2014 by amindfullife

Thirteen years ago I came across a book in a local bookstore by Rachel Naomi Remen called My Grandfather’s Blessings.  A book of stories  of strength, refuge and belonging.  For me it became a book of change, a call to action.  I had been struggling with how to re-imagine my work, my calling, a longing to work more closely with myself and with my patients within a relational space of being.  At the time I had little mentoring or modeling of a different way that I could turn toward other than a longing to be more present to myself and for my patients. Reading this book, and her previous one – Kitchen Table Wisdom, stories that heal – gave me a sense that there were clinicians engaged in finding a different way to be present.  The journey I then embarked on had me leave general practice, meander through various courses of applied psychoneuroimmunology, art therapy, hypnotherapy, counseling courses, set up an integrative mind body medicine practice, start palliative medicine training, and eventually, by listening to what my patients had to say in what was helping them, to train in mindfulness based interventions.  I allowed my longing for a deeper connection to myself, and for my patients to their own lives, to lead me.  And in so doing mindfulness has become far more than a meditation practice in my life.  It has become a way a being.  And along the way it has enabled me to show up just as I am and have the courage in that to accept not just that I can walk alongside my patients through the full catastrophe of their lives, but also that I can turn toward the full catastrophe of my own life, and finally accept and rejoice in living a complete non-dual three dimensional experience of that full catastrophe.

As Rachel Remen says in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom: ” Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life.  I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable.  ……  I had learned a new definition of the word “joy”.  I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness.  Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations.  Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there.  It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us.”

Finding myself in this very moment now.  A moment that holds all – the joy, the longing, the full catastrophe.  This moment I have intimately come to know as the only moment of time that I have any choice over to act, to decide, to chose what I will do, as Mary Oliver asks in her beautiful poem, The Summer Day – ‘What is it you plan to do with you one wild and precious life?’  And as a person who has a fair amount of anxiety around being ‘seen’ and ‘showing up’ in public I seem to be inquiring deeply into that vulnerability this coming year with writing more, developing more, teaching more, and speaking more.  To add to that this week I started writing a weekly mindfulness series for http://www.ehospice.com.  This won’t be going out as a regular post but will be updated as a static page on my blog – ehospice pages: mindfulness – our sixth sense.  Visit weekly to read the latest offering or go onto the ehospice.com website itself.

http://www.ehospice.com/ArticlesList/Mindfulnessoursixthsenseseriesintroduction012214112556/tabid/10127/ArticleId/8575/language/en-GB/View.aspx#.UuF51PZFB7w

20131123_142322

For Longing

Blessed be the longing that brought you here, And quickens your soul with wonder.

May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire, that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease, To discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

May the forms of your belonging, in love, creativity, and friendship, Be equal to the grandeur and call of your soul.

May the one you long for long for you.

May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feelings.

May your mind inhabit your life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world.

May your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.

May you come to accept you longing as divine urgency.

May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.

John O’Donohue

Posted in ehospice: Mindfulness - our sixth sense, Life, stories & more | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

2014 The Engaging with a Wholeheart Project: January

Posted on January 14, 2014 by amindfullife

IMG_4767

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

~David Whyte, River Flow: New and Selected Poems

 

So today I am starting close in.  Just this first step.  No more.  Right here.  Beginning this writing of vulnerability and all that it demands of us to show up and be present with kindness, gentleness, and tenderness.   Recent years have been a meandering through the encountering of vulnerability and resilience, in myself and in my patients and their families, but in some ways not an engaging deeply with vulnerability from the perspective of understanding its full spectrum.  That journey still daily unfolds.  Perhaps for all of us.

About eighteen months ago I was having a Skype conversation with a dear friend of mine after her recent solo ten-day silent retreat.  Curious about what had come up for her.  Curious about what had been present during the ten days alone at the side of a mountain, someone silently delivering food each day.  She told me she had sat many days with a new emotion that came up for her.  The emotion and engagement with shame and her visceral experience of how hot and deeply present it felt. I remember very vividly my initial thought of “Huh, I don’t really do shame.  Embarrassment and guilt maybe, but not really shame.” Some months later I was sent by email a TED talk given by Brené Brown on the Power of Vulnerability that has now gone viral with more than thirteen million views.   Brené Brown spoke extensively about shame and how it relates to vulnerability.  And for me it was like the floodgates opened up.  I suddenly was in touch with all the areas of my life that had been touched by vulnerability and shame, and moments that I had perhaps missed when my patients shared their experiences of this.  I was reminded of speaking with a young teenage patient, an orphan, a long way from home, staying with an aunt because she needed care given by one of only two renal dialysis units in the country.  Now after her body had rejected a kidney transplant, she was on peritoneal dialysis, having to infuse into and then drain out exchange fluid from of her abdomen every four hours so that the toxins accumulating in her body, due to her non-functioning kidneys, could be cleared.   Her renal team had asked me to spend time with her due to her depression, offer some space to express herself, and learn some mindful approaches to build resilience back into her life.  Her questions were sad and filled with loss and rejection.  Questions about feeling vulnerable and othered; questions about being shamed, and feeling shamed, questions of an extended family that had little tolerance for the difficulties of her illness process and rigid necessary practicalities of constant dialysis. And in that sitting with her I recognised how we all put up walls to protect our tender vulnerable beings.  How we all other and shame, are othered and shamed.  How we turn away from our vulnerabilities, hide our pain, or lash out.   How we all struggle to show up in that moment of feeling vulnerable and exposed.  And in that turning inward can be at great risk of depression and more.

Recently starting in on Brené Brown’s new book Daring Greatly: how the courage to be vulnerable transforms she mentions her previous guideposts for Wholehearted living which strongly resonated with my own journey, and that of the young people and families I serve.  So the seeds for this writing project took form, 2014 The Engaging with a Wholeheart Project, based on the ten guideposts for wholehearted living: cultivating authenticity; self-compassion; resilient spirit; gratitude and joy; intuition and trusting faith; creativity; play and rest; calm and stillness; meaningful work; laughter, song, and dance.  In this unfolding vulnerability project of cultivating a wholehearted life, for myself, those I love, and those I walk alongside, I will engage with each of these themes in the months to come.  Perhaps you wish to engage with them too.  One month at a time.  A be sure to have look at the TED talks if you haven’t already seen them.

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html

Posted in 2014 Engaging with Wholeheart Project | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The love window

Posted on January 12, 2014 by amindfullife

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Some kiss we want – by Rumi

There is some kiss we want with

our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater

begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately

it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask

the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into

me. Close the language-door and

open the love-window. The moon

won’t use the door, only the window.

So 2014 has begun.  A New Year.  So often a new year starts unaware, unbeknownst to us.  We continue along the same path, make resolutions that we are sure not to keep, and tread in the same well-trodden ruts.  To truly begin a new year on a new path takes an enormous amount of effort.  An analogy I use, I am sure it is not my own, for my mindfulness classes is that of trying to steer a carriage out of its well worn ruts.  It can be a seemingly impossible task and with the effort of changing paths the carriage itself is at risk of tipping over with the changing gravitational points.  Sometimes it takes looking at our lives from a completely different perspective to enable any change, or to confirm that we are indeed in the rut we wish to be.

This past year has been one of so much change that I find myself starting this new year very slowly.  Very tenderly.  Deeply listening to that which calls me into the future of my unfolding being.  A future I know that is held within the choice of this moment.  And as I reflect on the year past, a watershed year as I previously described, my mind, body and spirit connects deeply to a sense of exhaustion.  In that exhaustion I am reminded strongly of Irish poet David Whyte’s questioning of his own sense of exhaustion with life when he was faced with momentous change.  He enquired of his good friend Brother David Steindl-Rast what the antidote to exhaustion might be.  Brother David’s response has now become well known.  “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest.  The antidote to exhaustion is whole heartedness”.  Whole heartedness, not rest.  Not stepping out of our lives, or turning away to hide, but showing ourselves more fully, no matter how shattered we may feel. The antidote to exhaustion is to fully engage with our lives in a way that brings all of ourselves into it.  Allows all our being to be present and acknowledged. Not just the parts that we are happy and comfortable with but also the parts that cause us discomfort, that are messy and awkward, the deep longings and stirrings of our soul.

So this year, as I set the intention to step into it with wholeheartedness, one of the intentions I have set is my ‘engaging with a Wholeheart project’ based on themes taken from the writings of Brené Brown.  I have also this past week committed to writing for ehospice.com (www.ehospice.com) a series of articles on mindfulness based on the themes of the eight-week MBSR.  These will appear weekly from the week of the 20th January on the ehospice.com international page and I will repost on my blog.   Have a look at the website for news from around the globe on the hospice and palliative care community.

My intention this year is to write, speak and be from the heart.  To listen deeply within myself; to close the language door, the door of easy answers and stay, sit, wait, be, breath, and allow the love window to open; the window to the heart; that place within ourselves that is intimately connected to every part of our being; to sit within my own heart space with whole heartedness and allow the moon with its gentle reflected light and love to find me. May it find you too.

Posted in Love & loss, grief & joy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Watershed year!

Posted on December 31, 2013 by amindfullife

Image

What a year it has been.  A year of much water flowing, cascading, sometimes even bucketing down.  Perhaps even a watershed year.  Many tears shed, much pain experienced.  Lots of laughter, joy, and love too.  Many bridges built and crossed, some cracked, possible broken.  A year of enormous change in every aspect of my life.  A year of new paths forged, new challenges met, wonderful new friendships made and old ones grown.  A showing up and integration perhaps of whom I know myself to be.  So much to be grateful for.

Thank you, as always, to the readers who follow this blog.  Continuing to show curiosity in what I might write about.  Writing this blog has become a faithful companion, allowing some expression for my ongoing musings, and will continue in the new year as before.  A challenge to mindfully muse from the heart, with vulnerability, about my work, about life, and more.  There will be some additions.  I have added a page for my posts that seem to be primarily poetic in nature.  You will also see a new challenge page added that will see one post per month, posted usually on the 14th of the month, which will address, from my perspective, ten areas of engaging with vulnerability and cultivating wholeheartedness, as set out by Brené Brown in one of her books – authenticity; self-compassion; resilience; gratitude; intuition; creativity; play and rest; stillness; meaningful work; laughter, song and dance.  This is the writing challenge I wish to set myself this coming new year.  To show up, be present, and inquire deeply into vulnerability and what this may mean to living a wholehearted life.  In so doing to fully step into everything I have set into motion this past year, with kindness and compassion for all.

You See I want a Lot

by Rainer Maria Rilke

You see, I want a lot.

Perhaps I want everything:

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall

and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing,

and are raised to the rank of prince

by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces

that do work and feel thirst.

You love most of all those who need you

as they need a crowbar or a hoe.

You have not grown old, and it is not too late

to dive into your increasing depths

where life calmly gives out its own secret.

May you all experience much peace and ease and be greatly blessed with kindness, love, courage, and new adventures during 2014.

Posted in Courage, difficult emotions & death in every moment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Shadows of kindness

Posted on December 22, 2013 by amindfullife

2013-12-16 16.47.26

Winter solstice

Night of the long shadows

Night marking winter beginnings

Marking paradoxically, the return of the sun

And in days to come

A rebirth

A new year

New moments to recreate and re-envision this life

Winter solstice

Arriving on the whispered tail of increasingly long shadows

Turning again toward the coming light

A night that can only be opened to with kindness

Kindness in the depth of suffering

Kindness in the depth of pain and despair

Kindness that knows to

Stop, to

Pay attention, to

Be still, to

Wait, to

Have faith, to

Trust, to

Care, to

Be present

Kindness that knows that this

Is enough

Is a radical act of love

Bringing light

To the shadows

Allowing the winter

At its deepest darkest freeze to

Feel the warmth

To nurture the shoots

To have faith

That growth of the green promise will come

Winter solstice

As we turn anew toward the sun

Will bring to these shadows

Compassion

Patience

Capacity to protect solitude

Be the guardians of our solace

And that of the other

Protect the slow lumbering human process

Taking its own time

Needing its own space

Hibernating

Nurturing

Waiting

To turn

Toward

And begin again

Posted in Life, stories & more | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What are we doing?

Posted on December 1, 2013 by amindfullife

Since my house burned down

I now have a better view

Of the rising moon

Haiku by Basho

Image

It has been difficult to come to this writing these past months.  To write from the heart as I have committed to do for this blog, to be open and vulnerable in all that I choose to share.  There is a starting anew that is taking its own time, demanding its own pace, not just for this writing, but a starting anew of living, a starting anew of giving over to everything that arises in my heartspace that I may or may not wish to explore, and that demands paying attention now, in this only moment there is to notice. Moments at times that are unending, sometimes unbearable, but I have found can become moments of exploration, of curiosity, of settling, of letting go, even of joy and of great love, moments of rest and renewal, of realignment of self and staying with whatever arises.  These moments have been a time of rending like no other, of being bathed in a well of grief that finds no ground, and any pebble thrown in to contemplate its contents keeps dropping further away, and in that dropping only the capacity of being and loving fully present exists and holds it all.

During this time of being without anchor I have been noticing the urge to do something, the urge to be someone, the urge to have life sorted out and know all the answers. Especially the answers to why, why, why?  The how, what, when, where, are perhaps easier to find some traction with.  But the contemplation of why lies much deeper.  Lies perhaps more at an existential level.  A question we ask in so many areas of our life, and often rush to answer.  Rush to cover with our not knowing. What has become striking for me in this question, without any answer, or at its very best a most difficult answer, is how this question comes up again and again in so many areas of our lives.  Often when we are struck down by great suffering, by a change that is beyond our understanding.  When life comes right in close, stark, intimate, and personal, and interrupts our dream state in a way that we cannot but acknowledge its presence.

Why is the question many of my patients and their families ask, if we allow them to hear it for themselves.  Why me?  Why this?  Why now? Why?  And we have very few answers in response.  And in the difficulty of having no answers we fill the space with doing.  We rush to relieve our own distress with treatment options, with care plans, with more unbearable technology that we hope defies pain, suffering, and death.  We struggle to just sit and be with the why a while longer.  With not having the answers and with letting that be, and in that being be present to whatever arises, even to the incapacity to know what to do and the unbearable sensations of feeling less than in its overwhelming presence.

In the past few months, having faced changes in every facet of my life, moving from South to North, from everything material possible to much less, from big to small, from help to none, from driving to walking, from easy company of many friends and family to very few, from marriage to no longer, from a family mostly in one place to now moving out into the world, from working to not yet, from an under-resourced environment to one at times easily over-resourced, from warm to cold, and more, I have had to face intimately what if means to move from a place of doing to a space of being.  I have had to face intimately the unbearable sensations of feeling less than in the presence of not knowing and being touched by a deep learning of how to just be. I had thought, naively perhaps, that I had had a sense of what it means to just be, to allow life to show itself, but when everything is swept away the just being is no longer a simple choice, it becomes an existential choice and comes with an active letting go of needing this moment to be a particular way, perhaps an allowing in of a certain state of grace, of faith, that has nothing to do with an external being and everything to do with one’s internal capacity to rest in this moment, and in the knowing that this moment can hold all that shows up.  It is in this state of grace that life unfolds its rich bounty and beauty and wondrous moments of endless joy, even when at its most challenging and difficult.

The days and moments continue to unravel for me, demanding that I show up with faith for it all and choose to be here. The surprise gift of this change is the awareness that life indeed is completely real and that to be real it is messy, that to be real it cannot be packaged in a particular way and stay all neat and tidy. I have come to intimately know that things get completely messed up but it is not so much the pain and suffering we are affected by as it is our relationship to reality and our sense of self compassion in how that has to shift beyond a clinging only to the pain of the suffering and encompass a greater sense of self and of being.  This transformation from an illusion of life without feeling any of the suffering to the intimate knowing and becoming real through that suffering, is illustrated beautifully in the children’s story by Margery Williams ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

This awareness of being present for my own vulnerability, and through that awareness giving permission for those around me to be present to and show up for their own vulnerable precious beings, allows all of us to find our own way, our own voices, our own sense of self, independently of each other.  And it is in this independency and individuation ultimately that we come to learn the joy and love and pain and depth of dependence, of needing others, of once again understanding what it means to need to be nurtured, to be seen, to belong, to be real.  Being in such a way that the why falls away and there is only this, this present moment, this now, and enables the why to no longer be so relevant to how life unfolds.

One of the phrases often used in the guiding of mindful meditations is “resting here”.  It is a phrase I have often used myself, and many times heard.  It has never settled so deeply into my being as now.  What does it mean to truly rest here?  To just be without any expectation for what this present moment should hold?  To rest without knowing or striving for this moment to be a particular way?  This curiosity into the ‘resting here’ is my journey for now. Perhaps my journey for this lifetime.

I hope that in this, at times, frantic pace that leads up to the end of the year, you too may find some time to rest, to just be, to listen to your deepest longings, and to allow grace, in the face of the unbearable unknown, to fill you with a joyful presence of being.

David Whyte, as so often lately, continues to inform this journey.

  REST   is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is not stasis but the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to become present in different way, especially to give up on the will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we put it right; to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively from outer targets, not even to a sense of inner accomplishment or an imagined state of attained stillness, but to a different kind of meeting place, a living, breathing state of natural exchange…

From Readers’ Circle Essay, ‘REST’

©2011 David Whyte

Posted in Love & loss, grief & joy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments